When Dana Kanze and her business partner were pitching their startup for funding in 2009, they took turns talking to venture capitalists. Then and in ongoing conversations with prospective investors, Kanze noticed that questions addressed to her differed from those addressed to him.

Jeremy Dauber, the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture in the department of Germanic languages, was well aware that “analyzing comedy runs the risk of killing it.” Still, he forged ahead, chronicling the arc of Jewish humor.

David Henry Hwang has an illustrious career: he’s a dramatist whose work has won Tony, Obie and Grammy awards and is also America’s most-produced living opera librettist. But he had never taught formally before joining the School of the Arts Theater program in 2014 as head of its playwriting concentration. He had long mentored budding playwrights and run workshops because “that’s part of what you do as a dramatist,” he said.

Only a few blocks of Broadway separate Columbia’s classic Morningside Heights campus from the transparent glass and steel structures on the University’s new campus in Manhattanville, but the contrast between the two signifies more than a shift in architectural styles.

Nearly a week after Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria, the island’s 3.4 million residents face a growing humanitarian crisis. Most are still without power, food is scarce, and more than half have no access to drinkable water.

Category Four winds and a storm surge knocked out the island's electric grid and created a near-total communications blackout, leaving some towns unreachable. It’s estimated that it will take six months before power is fully restored.

“They are loyal Columbia alumni who bring with them decades of success and innovation in business and civic leadership, as well as a diversity of personal experience," said University President Lee C. Bollinger.